“This Blackest Purse”

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Via Pitchfork

In a word, WHAT? Even for a group as hard to peg as WHY?, "This Blackest Purse" is still something of a wicked knuckler, but not for the reasons you'd think. The second half of Alopecia proved these guys are willing to drop any pretense of hip-hop tethering and go straight piano man. Even so, it's still a little odd to hear Yoni Wolf cast himself as a brick drowning slowly over an eerily calm and stately melody. It's just not entirely new.

The real shift happens in the lyrics. Not in content-- Wolf moans about pleasuring himself in his shower, wearing his ex-girlfriend's dead-ex-boyfriend's boxers, and it's in line with the nebbishy perversions of songs past. But even then, such admissions came with a gallows humor or at least an acknowledgment of their own ridiculousness. "This Blackest Purse" is completely unfunny-- not that it's meant to be, but Wolf's resignation is all the more shocking for its straightforwardness-- "Mom, am I failing or worse?" In the context of something this quietly devastating, the question becomes what the "worse" he refers to could possibly be.